This chapter concerns caste consciousness as it has been manifested in surprising though generally uncontentious forms, most notably where one can see conventions of jati and varna difference retaining their power in the modern workplace and in the thinking of educated city-dwellers. Since the 1950s, cross-cutting affinities of faith, class and ethno-linguistic identity have often had a more direct and lasting impact on both local and national life than the claims of anti-Brahmanism, or Harijan uplift, or caste reform movements. The chapter examines why caste has come to operate for so many Indians in the manner of an imagined community, that is, as a bond of idealised allegiance answering needs which both in India and elsewhere have been more widely associated with the claims of two other forms of supra-local attachment, the modern nation and the ethno-religious community. In the years after Independence, social scientists found further evidence of the spread of these modern-minded or substantialised forms of caste consciousness.